I do consider myself well-read, but there was a lot of new stuff in here for me. Some, like financially astute monks and knights, are reaonably well-known, but others, like affluent peasants, sexually liberated women, and kings that served as defenders of the law, are less known. With this book Jones wants to remedy a lot of misconceptions we have of life in the middle ages. My favourite sections were the ones about the friaries that drove the financial and technological development of early middle ages, and the king that has been struck from British lists of regents. Despite that it is cramped with facts and analyses it reads very easliy, and left me with wishing it had been longer. He skillfully uses his comic ability to make the scholarly material more accessible to laypeople, like me. Terry Jones of Monty Pyhton fame is less well-known as an accomplished historian.
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